Dave Montizambert over at Rangefinder has an interesting tutorial about his Drop Outs technique. It’s a fast way to change the background to whatever your client asks for. It basically involves shooting your model indoors against a plain background and then photoshopping the desired background in.

“I create the image indoors using a technique called simulated sunlight, and marry it with a simple background drop out technique in Photoshop to drop in a suitable outdoor scene.

Of interest is how he uses a Fast Blend Mode to blend hair into a new background without the old background color either reflected in, or shining through, the model’s hair strands.

Read the article at: Rangefinder.

Some of us still love and believe in film photography. The continuing love fest for Holga, Diana, Polaroid and Fujifilm Instax cameras attest to this. Ken Rockwell is a big believer in “the timeless power — and exclusivity — of 35mm film.” You won’t read too many reviews about film cameras and we thought it would be interesting to feature one here.

The Fujifilm GF670W is a rangefinder camera that takes large 6×6/6×7 120 or 220 roll film and has a fixed EBC 55mm F4.5 wide-angle lens. The GF670W allows dual format shooting, which means that you can select between the square 6×6 format (120 – 12 shots/220 – 24 shots) or the 6×7 format (120 – 10 shots/220 – 20 shots), and without needing additional inserts. Of course, you can only do that when switching rolls. The GF670W features a coupled rangefinder, aperture-priority AE and manual exposure modes, electronically-controlled shutter (4-1/500 sec., B), center-weighted average metering, exposure compensation (+/- 2EV in 1/3 EV steps), and ISO 25-3200. [See, that's really all the features you need in a acamera to take great pictures.]

Richard Kilpatrick over at BJP reviews the GF670W and finds that the Fujinon 55mm f/4.5 wide lens (presumably assembled by Cosina) delivers “excellent corner sharpness, and beautiful bokeh, and any minimal distortion feels natural for the view of the lens.”

Read the Fujifilm GF670W Review @ BJP.

We’ve had lots of questions from readers about just what is a DSLR? Most of the answers on the Web pertain to the technical aspects behind the camera, namely the use of a mirror, as though that in itself explained the popularity of the DSLR. The mirror is the least important element of the DSLR — and may in fact be going the way of the Dodo bird!

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